RS

MEMBER DIARY

Section 304

“You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”
(Hotel California, The Eagles, the fog of my youth)

That American Dream – of owning a home – your own little patch of land where you can raise your kids and plant your roses and wash your car (only on an odd day) and build treehouses and burn your toast…. yeah, well, that’s such an old fashioned notion. Your house isn’t yours anymore – like everything else, it belongs (or will belong soon enough) to the state.

Here’s your bucket. Let me know when you stop heaving. If this piece of garbage passes, and isn’t repealed in the Great Revolt of 2010, guess what? You’ll be stuck in the same house, unless you have the dough to “green” your little bungalow to the state’s satisfaction. Forget getting transferred for a big promotion, or changing jobs and locations for a fresh start, or moving to get away from vile neighbors, dangerous schools, abusive spouses and/or gang terrorism.

This reminds me a bit of the story about a month ago where the Obama Administration wanted to raze rundown neighborhoods, allowing the cities to “shrink” and return sections “back to nature.” It’s the perfect Obama metaphor – his idea of “change” is destroying America, not building America.

If you follow the links from Jimmie’s post, you’ll find this little gem over at the NRO (emphasis mine):

Two main things to understand about Waxman-Markey: First, it will not reduce greenhouse-gas emissions, at least not at any point in the near future. The inclusion of carbon offsets, which can be manufactured out of thin air and political imagination, will eliminate most of the demands that the legislation puts on industry, though in doing so it will manage to drive up the prices consumers pay for every product that requires energy for its manufacture — which is to say, for everything. Second, it represents a worse abuse of the public trust and purse than the stimulus and the bailouts put together. Waxman-Markey creates a permanent new regime in which environmental romanticism and corporate welfare are mixed together to form political poison. From comic bureaucratic power grabs (check out the section of the bill on candelabras) to the creation of new welfare programs for Democratic constituencies to, above all, massive giveaways for every financial, industrial, and political lobby imaginable, this bill would permanently deform American politics and economic life.

This lunacy has to stop while there is still an America to salvage from the ashes. Help us, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re our only hope!